


For a Little While

by Major



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Feelings, Friendship/Love, M/M, Pining, Post-IT (2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22602430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: Bill remembered everything. For a little while.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon
Comments: 18
Kudos: 27
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	For a Little While

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).



Bill didn’t notice, not at first. The whole summer was so full of all of them that the trip to the movies and hanging out at the quarry and the arcade all started to blur together into one mesh of friendship. He forgot if it was Richie or Eddie that lost it in the arcade when a power surge wiped the scores. He couldn’t remember if it was Bev or Stanley that snorted soda through their nose while they listened to music and played cards at Ben’s house.

It was a good kind of fuzziness in his memory, where all of them stuck to each other so often and in so many combinations that it didn’t really matter who did what with who and when, so he mixed them up in retellings and got corrected with little more than a shrug and a nod when Richie cleared Eddie’s name by confessing to the grocery store fart that cleared out the aisle and Bev reminded him that it was Ben and not her that figured out how they could miss curfew one night without their parents flipping out. Bill was burned out but bouncing back, and his mind occasionally slipped up on small details.

Except when it came to Mike.

* * *

They were eating lunch together at an outdoor table at Joe’s Place after scrounging up enough combined change to all get a soda with their food, and Richie recounted ‘The Tale of Two Houdinis’ in which three of them had gotten caught out by a prowling group of bored bullies. Henry Bowers being gone had freed up a space in the town’s jerk hierarchy, and there were already people vying for the spot. Anyone younger and smaller was fresh meat, and they’d taken to disappearing on sight for those auditioning for Henry’s old role.

Their greatest escape to date came when the wonky honk of a beat-up muscle car alerted them that they were in danger of being spotted after getting milkshakes to cool off on their walk home. If they got caught down the alley, all it would have taken was the guys in the car to block both ways out, and they would have been rats with traps at both exits.

“So that’s when stupid Eddie got the bright idea to be trash people!” Richie exclaimed.

Bill looked up from his sandwich. “N-no. N-not Eddie. That was Mike.”

Richie’s brow furrowed, but he nodded a second later. “Oh yeah. Not stupid Eddie. It was brilliant Mike. And he was all, ‘Get in the dumpster!’ But I was too far, so I climbed in this box with honest-to-God corpse feet in there.”

Ben smiled and shook his head at the same time Bev said, “There was not.”

Richie shrugged. “No, but that’s what it smelled like, so there were obviously corpse feet in there before someone emptied it.”

“Hey, wait,” Eddie piped up. “How come I’m ‘stupid Eddie’, but Mike gets to be ‘brilliant Mike’?”

“Because you’re always needing me to explain why you’re stupid Eddie,” Richie shot back. “If you were brilliant, you would’ve got it the first time and you wouldn’t be stupid Eddie, would you, stupid Eddie?”

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

He and Richie launched into a two-man war about the nature of illogical arguments, name-calling to deflect truths about themselves, and whose mother got up to what last night with whom; all with a smattering of curses and the vocabulary of, well, boys their age. Bill tuned them out and looked to Mike next to him.

“It was k-kind of brilliant,” he said.

Richie had been too far on the other side of the alley, but he and Mike had hopped into the dumpster and pulled the lid over their heads just in time for the threatening rumble of the old car to take a slow cruise across the opening of the alley in their search for prey. There was a hole in the lid on the opposite side of where they were crouched to hide, and it leaked sunlight into the mostly empty dumpster.

It stunk in there, and the floor was sticky. Worse, he’d managed to spill half his milkshake over his own head in his acrobatic leap into a pile of trash. He could see Mike’s silhouette in the half-light of their hidden space and the creep of a slow smile as he reached out and pulled some of the thick cold vanilla from Bill’s hair off on his finger. They both had to bite down on their lips to keep from laughing and setting off their pursuers’ alarms, but Bill reached out quickly and grabbed Mike’s wrist when he played like he was going to lick the milkshake sludge off his finger. Bill shook his head with a smile that hurt his cheeks, and strangely, Mike’s answering smile hurt him too, though he felt that one low in his chest.

It was a long while hiding together and staring at each other’s dumb smiles, but the longer Mike’s eyes settled on his own, the less he remembered the rumbling car and the more it felt like a game. He wasn’t sure how to win.

“Hey, guys! You ever coming out of there?” Richie had called in the alley. “They’re gone.”

Mike’s smile was smaller, but Bill still felt it in that strange new hollowed out place he’d never felt before. He didn’t mind when Mike helped him out of the dumpster.

Mike looked at him now outside Joe’s Place where Richie had called him brilliant and Bill agreed.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“T-totally.” And he wished they’d taken a table inside, because he could feel himself getting warm next to Mike’s smile in response and had to duck his head away from the sun so his cheeks wouldn’t get any more flushed.

Bill didn’t seem to have much trouble remembering the details when it was about Mike.

* * *

He remembered everything. For a little while.

By the next summer, Bev was gone. From her letters, he knew she was settled with her aunt. She was happy. Things were good. He hoped it was a good sign when she stopped sending them. Maybe things were so good where she was that she could let Derry go with a clear heart. If she had to let them go too to move on, he would take that. Beverly deserved a happily ever after, no matter what that looked like.

Bill stared at the Twizzlers in the candy display at the movie theater. Bev liked to twirl them through her fingers during the scariest parts of whatever movie they went to see. It used to get Eddie started on the amount of transferable germs on your hands until someone in another row told him to shut up, but Bill knew she had to keep her hands busy so she wouldn’t remember the feel of a rod in her grip before she had to strike Pennywise in the head to save the rest of them.

“You miss her?” Mike asked, and his gaze flicked down to the Twizzlers.

“I do.” He remembered that dumb play and the press of her bloody hand on his cheek. “But I don’t want her to come back.”

Looking up abruptly, he opened his mouth to try to backpedal when he realized how that sounded.

Mike bumped his shoulder with half a smile that somehow shone brighter in his eyes than at the tug of his lips. “Trust me. I get it.”

Bill relaxed.

Of course he got it. Mike always got it.

“Okay, I got the loot!” Richie announced as he turned away from the cashier with an armload of candies for the movie. He tossed Eddie his but hesitated with the box of Whoppers. “Who wanted the goat turds? Stan?”

Bill held his hand up to catch them. “N-no. Those are Mike’s favorite.”

He handed them to Mike and accepted the first one out of the box when Mike offered it to him as they all started towards the theater. He didn’t really like Whoppers, but he didn’t like saying no to Mike.

He ate five more during the movie, and each time Mike’s fingers brushed his, that hollow ache in his chest that he’d started thinking of as Mike’s spot felt less like a black hole and more like a supernova. His science teacher said that supernovas were the biggest explosions that humans had ever seen. There wasn’t a star exploding in his chest, but each brush of Mike’s hand on his came closer to exploding his own understanding of himself.

He ignored the monster on screen and thought about the play and the day that he told Bev goodbye. Her lips on his and how big that had felt. The ache got worse when Mike caught him staring and didn’t ask why, just smiled and passed him another Whopper. This felt much bigger than that.

He turned back to the monster on screen and pieced the careful lie inside himself back together, knowing even as he did so that it would be hard to pretend. He’d eventually remember this moment and the brief admission. Because it was Mike’s supernova.

* * *

Their sophomore year brought a new monster: the Sadie Hawkins dance, and so began the torturous wait of seeing if a girl would ask any of the Losers out. It was times like that when Bill missed Bev in a very specific way. Maybe she could have even asked all five of them and saved the day en masse. Frankly, Bill just wanted it to be over so that Richie would stop making cracks about Eddie’s mom asking him.

The one thing Bill hadn’t been worried about was someone asking Mike since he didn’t even go to their school, so it came as a complete surprise when Stephanie Morris in a pink skirt walked over to them in the park where they had their books spread out around them to study together. None of the others had wanted to spend a Saturday doing schoolwork, so it had just been the two of them all afternoon. Bill had been enjoying the comfortable silence as they worked independently all the way up until Stephanie in the pink skirt appeared with her hands held together in front of her.

Mike was flicking Bill’s pencil with his own to try to mess him up while he skimmed a passage in the textbook and took notes since Bill had successfully managed to flick Mike’s pencil into making a long line across his own notes earlier. The joke was on him, though, as Bill quickly moved his pencil out of the way every time Mike tried to flick it. That was the thing about Mike. Bill was too aware of him for him to get the surprise leverage he needed to get him.

“Hi!”

Bill looked up, and his broad smile held for a moment when he saw her. They had a couple of classes together. She said hi to him sometimes. It wasn’t weird if she saw him in the park and decided to come over, but she was looking at Mike.

“You’re Mike, right? I think your dad does business with my dad’s diner.”

Mike didn’t explain that it wasn’t his dad. “Yeah. Stephanie, right?”

Pink dusted her cheeks. “Yes. Yeah. So, hey. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the Sadie Hawkins dance—”

Horror shot through Bill. His gaze jumped to Mike.

“He doesn’t go to our school,” he blurted.

Stephanie glanced his way. “I know.”

She turned back to Mike, but Bill’s heart felt like it did whenever Richie got them into trouble at gym and the coach made them run laps until his legs were rubber.

“So you c-can’t ask him.”

He felt Mike’s gaze on him but didn’t look his way. He didn’t want to see his expression. He was concentrating too hard on controlling his own.

“I know he’s homeschooled, Bill,” Stephanie said, looking slightly irritated now. “There’s no rule that says I have to ask somebody that goes to our school.”

“Yeah, b-but you c-can’t—” His stammer got too bad to force any other words out, which was just as well since he didn’t know what those words would have been. He just knew that Stephanie was a pretty girl that would be a beautiful woman, and he hadn’t known until that moment how terrifying those things were in combination with Mike. “N-no one would even kn-know—”

He hated his stutter, and at that moment, the ache in Mike’s spot that he usually treasured. It felt inflamed now. The whole spot was on fire.

“It’s okay,” Mike said, and Bill stopped struggling to speak. He turned a friendly smile up at Stephanie. “Sorry, but I have to work that night. I’m sure I would have had a really nice time with you, but I’m on a strict schedule. Can’t break it.”

Bill thought it was the friendliness in the rejection that eased Stephanie’s disappointment. She said something nice back that Bill couldn’t remember later. All he remembered was Mike repeatedly flicking his pencil the rest of the afternoon and making long lines across his paper, because Bill was too caught up in the fire—fear that had burned to relief—in his chest to ever see him coming. All he remembered was Mike riding over to his house on the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance, neither of them talking about how he didn’t have to work, and how closely they sat while Bill waited quietly for Mike to finish reading his latest short story out on the roof. All he remembered was Mike.

* * *

Bill turned sixteen, but it felt more like twelve after Richie anointed the year with an attack of silly string that he was still covered in on the walk home that night. They’d had fun out at the fort that they visited less frequently these days than they had when they were kids. He still loved it there, but it was starting to feel like the elementary school. Everything was too small and felt like it belonged to someone else the longer it went before dropping in again.

Mike lingered behind with him as the others went ahead until it was just the two of them. He wasn’t conscious of stopping at the sewer, lost in thought about all the extra years and birthdays he had even before Georgie died and the weight of all the ones he’d had since.

Mike touched his elbow. “He’d tell you happy birthday. He’d be glad you had another one.”

Bill only ever went to Mike when he had to talk about Georgie. He hadn’t done so in months, but still Mike knew. It settled him back in the present to be understood. It chased away the ghosts. He didn’t have to say anything when they started walking again. That was one of the things that drew him most to Mike, the comfort in few words and kind eyes, the way they could say a lot with almost nothing, how Mike’s spot had gotten so big that it was almost all of him. The way that sometimes he let himself believe that maybe Mike had a spot that belonged to Bill.

They stopped on the sidewalk in front of the fence outside his house even though Mike went out of his way to walk him all the way there.

“I had fun today,” Bill said and was happy that he could say that honestly. Last year, he’d been out of town on his birthday with his parents, and it had sucked. Two distant parents and a cupcake with a candle in it in a hotel room with nothing to entertain him but the homework he’d collected from his teachers before he left. There was no comparison between then and now.

“Happy birthday, if I didn’t say it earlier,” Mike said. “One of the last ones in Derry, huh?”

The certainty in the way he said it startled Bill.

“M-Maybe,” he conceded when he put some thought behind it. That had been the goal for a while now. Get out of Derry. Get away from the ghosts. “But n-not one of ours. Together, I mean.”

Maybe it was the lingering good feelings from a birthday well spent or the protective layer of silly string like a kid in armor, but Bill reached out and touched Mike’s hand, let his fingers stay there while his heart threatened to take off and leave him standing there alone with no line of defense between him and the confession that he knew was in his eyes when he looked up into Mike’s.

“We’ll have lots more. Just you and me.” He didn’t stutter, and his heart didn’t abandon him. He held fast to Mike’s hand, and let that hollow space in his chest fill up. With fear. Determination. With the knowledge that he was pushing towards something that he couldn’t take back. With hope.

Sometimes he thought….

Mike looked back at him. Still. His kind, steadying gaze didn’t falter, and Bill was fortified under the reassuring confusion and tentative curiosity in it that so matched his own. He thought Mike might fall into his spot, and Bill could carry him safely in his chest beside the heart that had taken up the stutter that his words had overcome to edge around telling Mike what he couldn’t really tell him yet.

When Mike did speak, it was almost too quiet to catch, and Bill couldn’t quite understand them even when he did. “I wish I could make you promise.”

He wanted to tell him that he could. That he didn’t have to. That Bill promised him all the birthdays he had left and wanted his, wanted more than Mike could give him because what Bill wanted was everything. It was on his lips to swear to it, to take the love his friends had shown him with their own presents earlier and hand Mike one back with all the certainty and affection that two words could hold: _I promise_.

But Mike’s hand closed to clasp his, and Bill remembered the barrage of fear when Henry Bowers attacked Mike when he was too far down the well to help. This was a different kind of helplessness. They were standing too close, and Mike’s head dipped, and Bill wished his heart had abandoned him after all because he was pretty sure it was going to stop. He hadn’t even promised yet, but—

His hand tightened.

He was imagining it.

He’d fallen asleep and dreamt that Mike was leaning in and he was safely no closer to what he wanted most.

But it was real, because Mike’s eyes were questioning but getting closer, his hand was still in his, he felt the tickle of silly string dangling on his forehead, and he really did think that maybe Mike had a ‘Bill’s spot’.

He closed his eyes.

_Maybe—_

“Bill!”

His eyes snapped open, and he jumped back from Mike. His hand felt cold.

The porch light was on, and his dad was standing out on the porch. He swallowed thickly and hurried through the gate.

“Good n-night, Mike,” he choked out, but his face was hot and he couldn’t look at him as he sped walked down the driveway, so Mike was forced to say to his back, “’Night, Bill.”

He didn’t know what he expected from his dad. He wasn’t sure what he saw or thought he saw. He wasn’t even sure what had happened or was about to happen and what he had only hoped for but had been unable to wish into existence. His father didn’t look at him as he went up the steps or passed him to go into the house, though. His eyes never left Mike.

Guilt washed over Bill. He felt like he’d done something wrong. He went up to his room and sat on the edge of his bed without turning on the lamp. In the calm silent darkness in the privacy of his room, Bill slowed his panic and decided after a long while that he had done something wrong.

He’d forgotten to tell Mike that he promised.

* * *

Bill remembered every almost-touch.

“Where is it?” Bill asked as he followed Mike through the field behind the old fruit snack factory. It closed down years ago. The building itself was the kind of run-down untouched warehouse that he made a habit of avoiding these days, having had his fill of broken places. Mike had brought him straight past it, though, and the afternoon was bright. The sky promised several more hours of sunlight, and it was almost enough to forget the thin walls enclosing the emptiness that loomed behind them.

“It’s back here.” Mike reached back for his arm or his elbow (or his hand) at the base of a steep hill, but his hand froze before touching him. His eyes flicked to Bill’s face, and Bill felt a catch in his chest that might have been something breaking or the quick burn when a matchstick lit too close to his fingertips. A flash of fear and relief when it was over. Only the burn was closer to his heart. Mike dropped his hand back to his side. “Watch your step.”

Bill flexed his hand discreetly as he ducked his head and followed him up the slope, wondering if it was fear he’d seen cross Mike’s eyes or his own reflected and unanswered.

He was glad it was a rough walk up. It kept them from talking, and he could pretend that he wasn’t afraid of one of his best friends. Or rather, afraid of how easily Mike could have taken that matchstick he felt and turned it into a torch.

He had all kinds of subjects they could safely talk about by the time they got to the top, stuff he didn’t care about that wouldn’t have meant anything. Mike looked back at him, and Bill had the sinking feeling that he read him as easily as one of the books he pored over while he and Bill did homework together, sneaking glances and listening to music. He swallowed hard, and the corner of Mike’s lips twitched.

“We’re here,” he said. “Ready?”

Bill didn’t know if he could say ‘yes’ honestly no matter what he meant.

“Ready for wh-what?”

Mike tilted his head to the side and walked across a span of land where it had evened out. Bill followed. Through a patch of trees, the hill they’d climbed cut off into a sharp drop. The edge sat above a drop that would have killed any hiker not watching their step, and it overlooked a side of Derry that was quieter than the foot traffic in town: farms and long stretches of countryside. The sky seemed to stretch for miles.

“Found this place the other day when you had that headache at the park and those kids were screaming and playing tag. I figured sometimes we might want somewhere quieter to study without having to go home. You know.” He shrugged as he dropped his backpack on the ground near but not too close to the edge. "I figured nobody would bother us here. What do you think?”

Mike wasn’t looking at him anymore, moving to his knees beside his backpack to search for his work.

Bill moved his gaze from Mike who was _not looking at him_ and out over the cliff’s edge, a peaceful spot that could be just theirs. “Y-You looked for this place, for us?”

Mike shrugged again but wouldn’t look up. “For you.”

Because sometimes Bill had bad days and headaches and had to go home early if there were too many people. Because Mike understood that better than anyone. Because it was the anniversary of Georgie’s death and the whole month wasn’t great and the week leading up to it was the worst. Because Bill tried to take care of the group, and Mike took care of him.

Bill sat down next to him in the grass and pushed his backpack off his shoulders. He opened his mouth to explain to Mike that he was grateful for his friendship and the pain in his chest that felt as good as it hurt every time they were together. He opened his mouth to tell him about the spot in his heart that belonged to Mike that started out like a hollow pang and now felt too full to breathe around when he said something that earned Mike’s deep laugh in response or was brave enough to touch Mike’s arm while he spoke and not have his hand shaken off. It was on the tip of his tongue to put a word to the reason he dreamt so often of Mike, pulling him into a dream from the last thoughts he had every night.

Mike finally looked up at him, and Bill saw that fear again that might have been Mike’s but was probably his own, and maybe they were sitting too close to a dangerous ledge right now to push themselves towards another one. He closed his mouth and pulled his homework out, pushing the word back to its hiding spot before it could escape.

Yeah. Bill remembered every almost.

* * *

There was a heat wave made all the worse by the humidity that drove everyone indoors during Bill’s last summer in Derry. He was going to leave for college in only a couple of months, and time had shifted from an intangible ticking of a clock into a physical pressure that alternated between an excited buzz under his skin and a wrench of fear in a place too deep to soothe with the lie that he still had enough of it. Time was infinite from Derry’s border onward, but he turned to Mike and realized time could be two things at once. Because he had too much, and he was also almost out.

They’d taken refuge from the heat in the library and had their own table. The building was mostly empty. Even the librarian looked lethargic behind her desk after just coming back inside from taking her lunch break. The silence was heavy and made heavier by the new weight that time had taken on. Bill felt like he was supposed to cross the finish line soon, but his pace had slowed and his heels were digging in.

Mike closed his book and got up to go back into the stacks. Bill looked over his shoulder and watched the strong lines of his back, the surefooted walk he knew so well, and realized he couldn’t leave Derry if it was a finish he was moving towards. He just wanted to get off the starting line.

The librarian looked up as his chair scraped noisily across the floor. Bill ignored her and the panic jumping through his quickening pulse. They’d taken on evil when they had to; Bill could be brave enough to take on something good.

Mike glanced at him when he rounded the corner at the back of the library where he was scanning the shelf at eye level for another book and pointed at one of them.

“I found another writing book,” he said. Sometimes Mike read them too, so he could ask Bill if he thought he could use the advice.

“Mike?”

“But I guess you’ll be learning everything you need in your fancy writing classes soon.” He grinned at him, and Bill knew that Mike didn’t want him to go but the pride he felt for him was real.

“M-Mike.” Bill stepped closer, heart hammering.

“I hope you’ll keep sending me your short stories while you’re gone.”

However long a while that turned out to be.

The request caught him by surprise. Mike was always his first reader. He wasn’t actually sure if he’d be able to write without knowing that Mike was waiting for him to finish. “Of course I will.”

“Because this library selection needs work.” He grinned. “I’m not going to have anything to read once you’re gone.”

“Mike.”

He looked at him then, and Bill’s courage faltered. Started to run. Dissolved into thin air.

Mike’s smile was soft. “Bill, you’re going to write the best stories of your life when you leave Derry. And I’m going to read every single one of them.”

Bill’s waning courage melted into something much stronger. It was a word he’d been putting to that spot in his chest with Mike’s name on it for years now. And it was with that love and not fear that he stepped forward, touched a hand to Mike’s face and kissed him alone in the back of a silent library. He didn’t have a large reference for that kind of thing, but his lips felt the kiss the least, almost numb in comparison. His heart _burned_.

He was vaguely aware of all the _nots_.

He was not being shoved back.

He was not rejected.

He was not ignored or passively accepted.

Mike’s hands were warm pressure on his waist. Mike’s head tilted. His tongue parted Bill’s lips, and the kiss was harder. His hands went tighter. Bill’s arms went loose around Mike’s neck as he leaned into it and knocked Mike’s back into the shelf. A couple of books fell off the top shelf and hit the floor, but he hardly heard the thuds. The world had gone grey and muted, and only Mike got through to his senses. Only Mike’s smile against his lips and the quiet softness of his murmured laugh as he pulled back for air and Bill’s lips chased his.

Only Mike. Ever.

Bill forgot time that summer, but he remembered every first. Their first kiss and the pile of fallen books at their feet. The first time they watched TV and Mike threaded their fingers together underneath the blanket covering their laps. That first perfect moment when he looked into Mike’s happy eyes in the library and knew that he wasn’t alone, that his secret belonged to Mike as much as himself. The first time Mike kissed him alone in his room while his parents were gone and they’d made an excuse to go out when they’d gotten spooked by what they could do alone up there. When they weren’t afraid anymore.

The feeling of the mattress against his back when Mike pushed him gently down. The press of Mike over him. The feeling that time had stood still and gone away and left them somewhere untouchable.

Bill camped out with Mike the night before he left. They held each other and whispered about this summer and all the ones before and said nothing about their last day until it came. He said goodbye with a promise in his heart and sent him twelve short stories over the first year he was gone about a boy in love who couldn’t go home because there were monsters under the pavement.

The next summer, he tried to recall what inspired those stories and put them away in a drawer at his desk.

* * *

Twenty-seven years after meeting him, fighting alongside him, loving him, forgetting him, Bill walked into a restaurant to meet a person he left behind. Mike turned around, and a thousand stolen moments came back and constricted his heart. The rest of it was still a haze.

But Bill remembered Mike.


End file.
